You will all be pleased to hear that Mark finished my car just before midnight last night, and I went out to work.
This was truly brilliant. Not being at work, obviously, although I have to say that this was really jolly nice. I had finished everything I had to do and could sit on the taxi rank without guilt. I wasn’t trying to hack in to the wi-fi from nearby restaurants. I wasn’t trying to trying to piece together sensible sentences to write letters or diaries or anything exhausting, and I already knew that I didn’t understand the bank statement.
Instead I propped my book up on the steering wheel and read it and ate chocolate left over from the Christmas tree. This can hardly be considered to be an adequate cause for self-pity, especially since it is a particularly good book, all about the Salem witch trials.
I sat contentedly on taxi ranks until bedtime, leaving Mark at home in charge of emptying dogs and encouraging Oliver and Harry to perform some ablutions. By the time I came home it was after four, by which time we were no longer entirely insolvent and I was feeling slightly sick and chocolate-sticky.
Mark went dashing off to the scrapyard in Kendal this morning to try and find a key which would contain the right components to repair his. This was relatively simple since we are now in possession of a functioning vehicle, how very uncomplicated this makes life. We have now got a whole taxi without smoke or grinding noises, and an un-punctured roof on our house, life is getting better every day.
At the time of writing we have still only got one taxi. Kendal scrapyard had some keys which Mark has dismantled only to find that they do not contain the necessary bit, and he has now gone dashing off to Barrow scrapyard, who have promised that they do have an electronic key which would be full of appropriate bits.
This is a long and tiresome journey, because the road from Windermere to the bottom of the lake has closed whilst the Water Board dig holes in it and enjoy tranquillity and solitude without being disturbed by dawdling tourists, speeding locals, buses or anybody trying to go anywhere on a bicycle. It is going to be closed until April. Suddenly absolutely everything in the world that we want to do is at the other end of that road, and we are rendered grumpy by having to trail all the way along the Lyth Valley to get anywhere.
Of course it is a sacrifice worth making in order to have clean fresh water continually piped into our homes, and dirty water full of poo whisked away instead of lurking about in a hole at the bottom of the garden. I am not ungrateful for such glorious benefits of the civilised world. The point of this story is that instead of taking Mark an hour to get to Barrow it will now take him an hour and a half, and the same to come back again: and so it is unlikely that I will see him before it is time to go to work.
Also I won’t be going to work yet anyway because as you will have surmised, he has gone in my car.
Instead Lucy and I had our end-of-holiday sitting on the trunk ritual, and felt pleased with ourselves when somehow, bulgingly, it closed. Lucy’s trunk is actually an enormous tin box that we bought on a market in Delhi once for the purposes of carrying an excess of purchased joss-sticks and silk rugs and leather flip-flops, and which has proved a magnificent investment over the years since then. We have painted it with a golden apple and some stars, and somehow the hinges have stood up to countless instances of abusive overloading for the whole of her school life so far, jolly well done that Indian chap with his little manufacturing shop. I can recommend him wholeheartedly.
I am taking her back tomorrow, since we are now motorists again. I am trying not to think about it because it makes me feel so sad. We will miss her very much.
I will think about it tomorrow.
LATER NOTE: Mark has fixed his key. He has made a new one out of the bits he has taken apart from three other keys and he has finally managed to come to join me on the taxi rank. He has filled the leaking fluid up on his car and is being very careful with the clutch, so we think that we will probably manage tonight.
I can’t say what a splendid thing it is.
We are back in business.
